‘Less Is More’ Is Mattering Most New York Fashion Week.

TOM FORD’S fashion show at his Madison Avenue store last fall was a tour de force of image control. Staged with little fanfare, documented by a single photographer and attended by no more than a hundred hand-picked guests, the show was signal departure for Mr. Ford, who, during his tenure at Gucci in the 1990s, was a master of the super-size spectacle. “I wanted fashion to be fun again, like it was in the ’60s,” he said of his insiders-only affair. Today, he added, “you see the clothes on the runway, and within an hour or so, they’re online.” “They’re overexposed,” he said. “I wanted to pull everything back.” Mr. Ford’s audacious gesture, some argue, set a new bar. “He shook up the industry,” said Paul Wilmot, a fashion publicist, “and if somebody says they weren’t influenced, that would be a lie.” Which may be why, as New York Fashion Week kicks off Thursday, many designers are scaling back, abandoning the extravagant productions of the past in favor of more pointedly exclusive affairs. Like the fabled Kansas City of “Oklahoma!,” fashion, they suggest, has “gone about as fer as it could go.” “A show has been done on the Great Wall of China,” said Coline Choay, the director of publicity and marketing for the Altuzarra label, referring to a much documented 2007 Fendi spectacle. “So now we have to ask ourselves, “What are we going to do next?’ ” “Next,” for a significant number of the more than 200 designers parading their collections this season, entailed finding smaller sites and limiting attendance, with the aim, in some cases, of recreating the plummy atmosphere of an old world défilé, with its velvet-voiced narrator and little gilt chairs. Such strategically elitist moves suggest that Mr. Ford’s presentation, the most talked-about of last season, has had a ripple effect. “Intimate is a word that’s definitely in the air,” said Ed Filipowski, a president at KCD, the public relations and event-production powerhouse with a client roster that includes Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui and Alexander Wang. James LaForce, a fashion publicist, has encountered designers who are questioning the validity of a blockbuster show. “I’ve heard plenty of people saying, ‘Let’s do a Tom Ford kind of thing,’ ” he said. “They are asking themselves, ‘Is more really more, or is morewatering down our influence?’ ” And according to a spokesman for IMG, which produces the fashion shows at Lincoln Center, there has been a stepped-up demand this season for the smaller spaces, like the 250-seat Box, and the Studio, which accommodates 500. Certainly Mr. Ford tweaked the industry, appealing to the snobbishness that so often fuels it. “As Americans, we love to be told we can’t go someplace, because then we want to go there,” Mr. Wilmot said. “Tom played on that area of people’s psyches.” More important, his presentation underscored a need for change. “In this day and age when there are so many shows, everything gets so much coverage through live streaming, Twitter and the blogs,” Ms. Choay said. “You want to make the live show experience special.” The Altuzarra show at Milk Studios on Feb. 12, one of the week’s most anticipated, will accommodate no more than 300 guests, about a third fewer than last season. “Why would you want to spend hundreds of thousands on a show when everybody’s on their BlackBerry and the clothes seem secondary?” she asked. “Intimacy, exclusivity and a chance to see the clothes: those are our priorities. We like exposure, but we want a more controlled exposure.” Smaller shows “put the focus on the product, where it should be,” said Wes Gordon, a designer with an Uptown following. Mr. Gordon plans to showcase his 18-piece collection at the St. Regis Hotel, in the gilded, wood-paneled Fountainebleau Room, his models arranged around a grand piano. “I want to be able to point out to visitors that this button or that detail was made by a jeweler,” he said. “I want to be able to personally walk them through the collection.” MORE-modest productions are not without precedent. Over a year ago, Marc Jacobs made waves by largely eliminating celebrities and slashing attendance at his show to only 500 from 1,400. More recently Victoria Beckman captivated audiences by showing at an Upper East Side town house, the models brushing by spectators’ knees as Ms. Beckham herself narrated the proceedings. By consensus, however, it was Mr. Ford who laid to rest the notion that bigger is necessarily better. His show “made it more acceptable to do an alternative to big catwalk,” Mr. Gordon said. Even Isaac Mizrahi is shifting course. A master showman who charmed thousands at the height of his career with flamboyantly theatrical productions, he plans to transfer his fashion parade from Lincoln Center to Exit Art, a nonprofit cultural center and alternative gallery in Hell’s Kitchen. “To me right now, intimate feels better,” Mr. Mizrahi said. He hopes to create a “cozy, fun experience,” he said, during which “the clothes will be seen to their best advantage.” Nicole Miller, who in the past invited as many as 1,500 guests, including celebrities, to her shows, will present her collection at the Studio. The idea, she said, was to limit seating strictly to steadfast clients and other professionals. “Besides,” she said, “a small show is just chicer.” Such arguments, of course, could be seen as putting an acceptable face on hard realities. The publicist Vanessa von Bismarck noted that some of her designers were driven by financial pressures to limit the size of their productions. “They just don’t have the money to put on a big show,” she said. Others may stick to larger shows because they simply lack Mr. Ford’s charisma or formidable clout. “What worked for Tom Ford doesn’t work for everybody,” Mr. Filipowski said. He further questioned whether going minimal is not “just another of those artificial debates that fuels our industry.” “In reality,” Mr. Filipowski said, “we’re not seeing big changes in the size of the shows.” Stephen Courter, a partner in the Ohne Titel label, has actually added 100 seats this season, about one third more than last fall, an attempt to be more inclusive. “Even editors you have no relationship with insist on coming to the show,” he said. “People really want to be part of it, and it’s hard to say no.” But in a fashion landscape that has been radically transformed by the Internet, overblown productions can seem redundant, not to say archaic. John Crocco, who designs women’s clothes for Perry Ellis International, is planning a live Webcast of his show on Friday from the Stage space at Lincoln Center. “I don’t need a lot of people to be sitting at the show when I am reaching thousands of people through new technology,” he said. As of December, even Mr. Ford’s show had been posted on YouTube. Such considerations are immaterial to Yeohlee Teng. Having mounted events large and small, she has chosen this season to invite no more than 50 guests to a show on Feb. 14 at her new boutique in the garment district. “Big shows are so ’90s,” Ms. Teng said acidly. “But to do something inventive and individual, that’s kind of fashion’s next wave.”